From a technical point of view, the instruments of bamboo attain an importance above all other Chinese instruments.  According to the legend, the Pan’s-pipes of bamboo regulated the tuning of all other instruments, and as a matter of fact the pipe giving the note F, the universal tonic, is the origin of all measures also.  For this pipe, which in China is called the “musical foot,” is at the same time a standard measure, holding exactly twelve hundred millet seeds, and long enough for one hundred millet seeds to stand end on end within it.

In concluding this consideration of the music of the Chinese, I would draw attention to the unceasing repetition which constitutes a prominent feature in all barbarous or semi-barbarous music.  In the “Hymn of the Ancestors” this endless play on three or four notes is very marked.

    [Figure 02]

In other songs it is equally apparent.

    [Figure 03] etc.

    [Figure 04]

    [Figure 05] etc.

This characteristic is met with in the music of the American Indians, also in American street songs, in fact in all music of a primitive nature, just as our school children draw caricatures similar to those made by great chiefs and medicine men in the heart of Africa, and, similarly, the celebrated “graffiti” of the Roman soldiers were precisely of the same nature as the beginnings of Egyptian art.  In art, the child is always a barbarian more or less, and all strong emotion acting on a naturally weak organism or a primitive nature brings the same result, namely, that of stubborn repetition of one idea.  An example of this is Macbeth, who, in the very height of his passion, stops to juggle with the word “sleep,” and in spite of the efforts of his wife, who is by far the more civilized of the two, again and again recurs to it, even though he is in mortal danger.  When Lady Macbeth at last breaks down, she also shows the same trait in regard to her bloodstained hands.  It is not so far from Scotland to the Polar regions, and there we find that when Kane captured a young Eskimo and kept him on his ship, the only sign of life the prisoner gave was to sing over and over to himself the following: 

    [Figure 06]

Coming back again to civilization, we find Tennyson’s Elaine, in her grief, repeating, incessantly the words, “Must I then die.”

The music of the Siamese, Burmese, Javanese, and Japanese has much in common with that of the Chinese, the difference between the first two and the last named being mainly in the absence of the king, or musical stones, or rather the substitution of sets of drums in place of it.  For instance, the Burmese drum-organ, as it is called, consists of twenty-one drums of various sizes hung inside a great hoop.  Their gong-organ consists of fifteen or more gongs of different sizes strung inside a hoop in the same manner.  The player takes his place in the middle of the hoop and strikes the drums or gongs with a kind of stick.  These instruments are largely used in processions, being carried by two men, just as a sedan chair is borne; the player, in order to strike all the gongs and bells, must often walk backwards, or strike them behind his back.